


happiness

by LiveLaughLovex



Category: The Code (TV 2019)
Genre: Babies, Established Relationship, F/M, Introspection, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:02:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28193658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveLaughLovex/pseuds/LiveLaughLovex
Summary: There was a time in his life when Abe didn't think he'd get to be happy.He certainly was glad to be proven wrong.
Relationships: John "Abe" Abraham/Harper Li
Kudos: 6





	happiness

**Author's Note:**

> Surprisingly enough, this is _not_ titled after the new Taylor Swift song. I really wanted to write about Abe and Harper having a Christmas baby, but, of course, with me being me, I simply couldn't do that in a form that didn't require me to write about John Abraham's inner trauma and troubles beforehand. I apologize. I will try to have something fluffier out in a bit - school's out for about the next month, so I've been inspired to write about these guys more! - but for now, I hope you enjoy this one! :)

There was a time in his life when Abe didn’t think he’d get to be happy.

Relatively content? Sure. Successful, perhaps, first as a Marine and then as a lawyer. He couldn’t deny he’d prospered in both fields. But happiness? It always seemed like something he’d missed out on, like the sort of thing his peers had found for themselves decades earlier, back when he was in Basic or just around the time his superiors started shipping him off to war. He’d had pictures of wives and children passed to him in crowded Humvees and on hops into the unknown back when he wasn’t ready to pass around pictures of his own.

By the time he wanted to be passing around those pictures himself, he was in his mid-twenties and had nearly bled out in a warzone. He’d buried comrades, friends. He’d had to watch as men died for him and because of him. The Corps rotated him back home and put him through law school. They let him remake himself. By the time he’d finished rebuilding who he was before it all, though, he didn’t exactly have the energy required to build anything else.

It wasn’t as if he was alone in the world, after everything that happened. Jason took him under his wing with ease, convincing him to come around for family dinners. Within hours of meeting little Danny Hunt for the first time, he’d transformed from just Abe to Uncle Abe, and it was a title he carried proudly. He accompanied the Hunts to just about every dance recital the little girl was ever in, though it was usually just him and Alex (and, eventually, baby Maggie) cheering the little girl on from the crowd. Jason wasn’t around all that often, back then.

Jason wasn’t around, and then Jason was dead. It took Abe less than two months to fall into bed with his best friend’s wife. He allowed her to convince him that Jason wouldn’t have wanted either of them to be miserable for the rest of their lives. He managed to convince himself that perhaps this was always meant to be the way things were, that maybe the Hunts were introduced into his life because he was meant to be what they’d lost, and they were meant to be what he’d never had.

That wasn’t the truth. That’d never been the truth. But it took being court-martialed for him to realize it. It took having to relive the most excruciating moments of that final tour, having to confess to a room full of people – including those he most liked and respected – all he’d done wrong back then, all the pain he was guilty of causing and the lives he was responsible for having been lost. It took sitting across from the widow of Demarcus Dixon and watching her so openly mourn the husband she’d buried nearly a decade earlier to realize that perhaps he needed to take some time for himself, to figure out just what it was he wanted. As much as he loved her, it didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t Alex.

They hadn’t grieved, really, for his best friend or her husband. They’d been in pain, even if it hadn’t been obvious, and so they’d found what was familiar in a world neither of them truly understood anymore. It was good, for a while. Abe could admit that. But it wasn’t ever the sort of good that was truly meant to last. In the end, he respected her – and himself – too much to allow them to settle into what was simple, rather than searching for what was hard to find, difficult to keep, and extraordinary to have.

Love. The true kind. The sort responsible for wars and novels, for paintings and poems. The sort Alex had with Jason and Abe hadn’t ever had with anybody. The sort that, even after everything, Abe still wanted to believe he deserved.

He found it, eventually, when he wasn’t even looking for it and certainly where he wasn’t expecting to find it. One night, over Chinese food and far too many cups of coffee, he glanced over at Harper as she squinted down at a statement, trying to decipher the NCIS agent’s terrible handwriting, and this sudden rush of unbelievable fondness, unlike anything he’d ever felt before, swept over him.

As they sat there, with him staring at her, dumbstruck, and her too focused on her work to pay him any mind, a sudden thought entered his mind.

_So that’s what it’s supposed to feel like._

That thought never did go away, in relation to her.

Still, knowing he was in love with her didn’t prevent him from nearly screwing everything up with her. They didn’t go about everything the way they should’ve. They fell into bed long before they should’ve. Eight weeks later, just as they were beginning to settle into their relationship – as they carried on with working through the problems in their personal pasts so that they could better build a future that felt right for the both of them – one word on a single white stick caused everything in their lives to change, all over again.

This time, though, the change was good. This time, the change was everything they both wanted, and it came at a time when they both wanted it. The change didn’t feel like an ending, this time around. It felt like a beginning, instead.

The day his daughter was born was easily the most terrifying of his life, more so than any day in all those months he’d spent at war and every other near-death experience he’d endured in his past. Her birth was a difficult one. Harper was, as always, the strongest person he’d ever known. She never let on how much pain she was in, not to anyone other than him. After seventeen long hours passed, their little girl – their little Josephine Caterina, named for his grandmother and hers – was placed, squawking indignantly, on the chest of her exhausted mother.

Abe had never really believed in love at first sight, before. He believed in it then, though. As he stared down at his daughter, a replica of her mother with eyes identical to his own, he knew, beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt, that he loved her more than he’d loved anything else in his entire life. He didn’t need even a second longer than the first that passed in her presence to be certain of it.

There was a time in his life when John Abraham think he’d ever get to be happy. Not genuinely happy, the way he wanted to be, even though he wasn’t sure he deserved to be. But as he sat there on the sofa, arm wrapped around Harper’s shoulder as she cradled Josie close to her chest, he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was.

Sometimes, he really was very grateful people didn’t always get out of life only what they felt they deserved. Because he’d seen happiness. It was Harper, hanging ornaments on the tree. It was Josie, sleeping in velour Christmas pajamas, her tiny fist tucked beneath her tiny chin as she sucked contentedly on a pink pacifier.

He still didn’t know if he deserved that happiness. He knew how grateful he was to have it, though, and he knew that wouldn’t ever change. And really, in the grand scheme of things, he knew that mattered a great deal more than any of the rest of it ever could. 


End file.
